This is the end of my walking notebook; I’ve posted every page except for a few at the beginning that I skipped because the November 1 page makes a better start. I am putting together a list of addenda, links and maps that accompany some of the writing, and I’ll post that here as well. See the Walking Notebook tag if you’d like to see the whole project at once.

My summer game project is coming along well. I’m leaving for a trip to the U.S. this week, and was hoping to post a new draft version before I left, but it looks like it will have to wait until I get back. As you can see from the screenshot above, the game has progressed a little graphically, and I’ve added a number of new types of objects, and the ability to build permanent bridges and walls. I’ve also rewritten a ton of code to make it more efficient. I’m still working with Raphael and SVG, but unfortunately I’ve run into a serious bug that affects scrolling SVG patterns in Safari. Basically, when the window scrolls, Safari does not scroll the SVG fill patterns, which makes the game sprites look completely garbled. I keep running into random bugs like this, which are made even more frustrating by the fact that not many people are using browser-based SVG, so when I do happen across a bug there is little documentation to be found and there is nothing I can do to fix it. To avoid some of these problems I am going to switch to using DOM elements like divs to create some of the sprites, instead of SVG objects. This is the technique I’ve been using for my previous games (Probable System and Favimon). Since I’ve started to use pixel art for some of the game graphics, this makes more sense anyway – the advantage of SVG is that I can easily draw and animate vector shapes, but once I start creating pixel-based artwork, divs with background patterns will work just as well. I’ll still use SVG for things like the islands, which are randomly generated, and stones placed in the water, which are animated as they sink.

Another batch of pages from my November 2007 walking notebook, written in Halifax as part of my Interchange project. See my previous post for context. I’ll post more from this notebook over the next couple of weeks.

I’ve been working on a draft design of Make No Wonder, which you can play here. It’s definitely a little rough around the edges at this point, but I’ve resolved a couple of major bugs which were slowing things down. One huge drawback to browser-based game development is that every browser has its own quirks, especially with lesser-used features such as SVG. I’m using the Raphaël library, which is convenient in some ways, but working with both it and jQuery occasionally causes problems.

This draft version demonstrates a few of my ideas for Make No Wonder, including randomly generated islands, collecting objects to increase mobility, and the player leaving a permanent trail behind them. It’s fairly simple for now, but now that I have the basic engine working, I can start to include more complex environments and interactivity. Right now I’m working on adding the mouse-based controls from my Newfoundland Hex Map Interaction to this design.

The screenshots above are from a slightly earlier version of the game where stones were coloured yellow. The islands generated at the moment are fairly simple, and stick to a grid – I need to combine this version with some of the code from my earlier experiments (see my Random Islands post). There are also problems at the moment when the islands generated are bigger than your browser window – try reloading the page to get a new random collection of islands if that happens.